http://lampbane.livejournal.com/515121.html

"I was amused by the characters at first; [my friend] used the phrase "petit bourgeois teenagers," which is pretty accurate. The pretentiousness struck me as funny instead of grating (at first), and that's part of why I recommended the book to her.

[...]

The other thing I liked was just that the novel actually felt like high school to me, which many novels about teenagers fail to do. The problem tends to be that many authors view the school part of high school as nonessential to the plot, and as such, gloss over it. [...] But anyone who's actually in high school knows that classes and such aren't incidental, they a huge part of the teenage experience, dominating your consciousness and defining your life for that period of time. So many of the journal entries in this novel reflect that - Flannery might mention something that happened in class and not say anything about her friends at all and that's an entire day. [...]

Because the book is a teenage journal, it is hard to read at times. I don't remember what my journal entries looked like as a teenager, but I would hope I believed in paragraph breaks. [...] Flannery evens acknowledges she's changing things around to make them flow better but part of the novel's conceit is that she's really not that good at it, and sometimes things don't work properly and she knows it, too. So I was never really sure if I missed something earlier in the novel, or she did. Maybe it sounded like a good idea in Handler's head, but on paper it doesn't work as well and it certainly doesn't work well in my head." ( )

Scathing, self-aware, hilarious and occasionally desperately shocking. An adult Lemony Snicket for the kids who were smart in high school and didn't know how to control their raging hormones. Slightly confusing drift towards the ending - I feel the sense of open-ended narrative was purposeful, but still feels drifting in a sea of sharp humor and characters. Flan is a particularly entertaining heroine that collapses into her own delusional view of what her life is, and the supporting cast is perfect in their cliches. The final party of the novel reminds me of more than one similar party, minus the murderous mayhem. ( )

I've been wanting to read Handler's first book for years and have finally gotten around to it! It was totally worth the wait, it was as dark & twisted as I expected it to be. He's got a weird sense of humour that works for me and hte plot of this book was just plausible enough to keep me interested. ( )

This book completely blew my mind at the end. I knew something fishy was going on but really, I had not thought that. It is also sad how much like high school this book actually seems. You would like to think that most teen's are not that shallow. I originally bought this book because some of my favorite childrens books are The Series of Unfortunate Events that Handler wrote as Lemony Snicket...I really enjoyed the book, but it was nice and depressing at the same time.

This is the kind of book that invites rereading--as soon as I finished it, I wanted to go back and reread it with an eye towards picking up all the subtle clues that pointed towards the resolution. It's a lot of fun (in a morbid way, at least after a certain point) and the whole time you can see things coming together and at the same time coming apart, and building up to what we know (from the introduction) is going to happen. ( )